No. /bin/sh is not really optional on any install (that I've ever seen). If it is that vendor would be seriously breaking with tradition, there is a very good reason for a small statically linked shell. In most cases now it is linked to bash (i.e. literally a symlink) which is unfortunate because bash is often nolonger compiled statically, meaning if you lose one critical library you are really up the creek. Still it's more reliable then hoping for a cdrom drive for most headless servers =). Another alternative is to boot from floppy and use rescue via network.
We know of the old tradition of statically linking /bin/sh, we would like to have it, but it doesn't work that way. With modern glibc systems, static linking is not supported any more, mostly because of the language/localization support. If it was all that easy, we'd have it there.
Kurt Seifried, kurt@seifried.org
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